In this paper it is shown that by explicitly considering the existence of unemployed trained workers, some of the results shown by Acemoglu and Pischke regarding the effect of unemployment on the firms' training decisions become ambiguous. In fact, two contrasting effects have to be considered:...

We exploit a natural experiment based on the Italian promotion system for associate and full professor positions to investigate gender differences in the willingness to enter competition. Using data on about 42,000 professors and controlling for productivity and a number of individual and field...

We analyse how schooling in multigrade classes affect the formation of student cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Our identification strategy is based on some institutional features of the Italian educational system establishing a minimum number of students per class. Classes that do not reach...

In this paper we analyse whether the characteristics of university teaching staff matter with regards students' performance and interest in the discipline. We use data on about one thousand students enrolled on the first level degree course in Business and Economics at a medium sized Italian...

In imperfectly competitive labor markets returns to skills are lower than their productivity and educational standards may play an important role in stimulating students to provide effort. We propose a principal-agent model to analyze the determinants of student effort and the setting of...